16.9.15

JACK BRUCE AUCTION SALE

Cardross Street

Nasmyth Street in
Hammersmith, where I lived in the eighties, runs parallel to Cardross Street, a
lovely little narrow backstreet with two-up-two-down terraced cottages that
once housed working families. It is in the heart of what estate agents now call
Brackenbury Village and these tiny houses, probably bought for less than £2,000
in the 1950s, now sell for a million, give or take a hundred grand either way
depending on their condition. I used to walk down Cardross Street fairly
regularly in those days on my way to the Andover Arms and I took note of their
condition: invariably the ones that looked a bit shabby were those occupied by
elderly people and sooner or later they’d come up for sale; the hearse followed by a skip and scaffolding. In rock’n’roll terms ‘the hearse followed
by the skip’ can sometimes, regrettably, be translated as ‘the obit followed by the sale’. This week I
received from Sothebys the catalogue for a Rock & Pop sale to be held on
September 29, and pride of place is given to the Jack Bruce Collection, so less
than a year after Jack passed away (on October 25, 2014) his heirs have been obliged to unburden themselves of his gear, which isn’t surprising as Jack always
struck me as being the kind of bloke who was more interested in making music
than making money.

Pride of place in a large collection of
guitars, basses, keyboards, handwritten lyrics, clothes and jewellery is given
to his favourite bass guitar, a 1993 fretless Warwick that was made especially
for him, a bespoke one-off that he played at the Cream reunion shows in 1995
and when he was on tour with Ringo
Starr’s All-Starr Band. In the catalogue Jack is quoted as saying: “If anything
ever happened to my old Warwick Fretless Thumb Bass, then I might as well hang
it up [playing bass] entirely, because it is irreplaceable. I love it above all
else.”

The estimate for the
instrument is £80-100,000.

I sympathise with families
of rock icons who are obliged to sell their loved ones’ most prized
possessions. It happened with another great bass player, John Entwistle – a big
sale that I attended – and possessions belonging to his colleague Keith Moon have
also been sold. But it didn’t happen with the two Beatles who are no longer
with us and it didn’t happen with Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham or Queen’s Freddie
Mercury either. The reason, of course, is that unlike John and Keith these
much-missed musicians had sufficient cash in the bank to preclude the need for
their heirs to dispose of valuable instruments and the like.

In the words of the great Hunter S. Thompson: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”There are some other interesting items in this catalogue that I will post about later.